Michael Kramer, who’s spent decades committing first-rate political journalism for New York, Time, the New York Daily News, and other publications, was terrific about the domestic politics of the times covered in this book, and about the dynamics of the Middle East—thus confirming the suspicions of his fellow lunch companions that he must have been a contract employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Andrew Bergman, the writer-director who has given us Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, The Freshman, Honeymoon in Vegas, as well as the Jack LeVine detective novels, inspired some of the twists and turns in the world of popular culture seen here.
For help in conjuring up advertising campaigns, who better than Jerry Della Femina, whose stature as a Madison Avenue icon is (subtly) celebrated in many of the most talked-about episodes of Mad Men, as well as in his classic memoir, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.
Dr. Gerald Imber, one of New York’s most prominent plastic surgeons, was of particular, if not exactly traditional, help. His relentless insistence that I “would never finish that—-ing book!” was a reliable source of inspiration.
One of our group, the film critic Joel Siegel, died in 2007. I miss him every day, and know that, had he been around, he would have argued strongly for changing the book’s plot so that all of the principal players would have discovered their Jewish ancestry.
In my effort to learn the thinking of those close to Robert Kennedy about the fight for the Presidential nomination that never happened, I read through a sheaf of oral histories on file at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and Library. My thanks to its Director, Thomas J. Putnam, and to Research Archivist Stephen Plotkin.
At CBS News, I found a powerful ally in the person of Cryder Bankes, the Manager of Library Services at the CBS News Reference Library. He was able to find for me shelves full of long-out-of-print books, as well as obscure monographs and research papers, with astonishing speed.
For more than a decade, Beth Goodman-Plante has worked with me: as an assistant at CNN and CBS News, as a researcher, as a coordinator of logistics. Let me not overstate the case: There is no one in the world I would want at my side, in any work that I do, more than Beth Goodman-Plante. Period. End of story.
Finally: On February 12, 1997, through a series of coincidences worthy of a Nora Ephron movie, I met Dena Sklar. I fell in love with her that night; and, thanks to some karmic good deed I must have performed in an earlier life, she fell in love with me. We have been together since, now as husband and wife. If it is true that one of the keys to happiness is a sense of gratitude, then I am among the happiest of men. The twist of fate that brought us together that night is one for which I am immeasurably grateful every day.
ALSO BY JEFF GREENFIELD
NONFICTION
The Advance Man (with Jerry Bruno)
A Populist Manifesto (with Jack Newfield)
No Peace, No Place: Excavations along the Generational Fault
The World’s Greatest Team
Television: The First Fifty Years
National Lampoon’s Book of Books
Playing to Win: An Insider’s Guide to Politics
The Real Campaign
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!
FICTION
The People’s Choice
Then Everything Changed Page 53